Sythyry&#39;s Journal

[OOC: I'm considering running a short WT game in which a mad wizard-or-something brings a few humans, whose players are unfamiliar with the Tree, and converts them to primes for convenience. Would that make any sense given that people might think, "That's some kind of outsider in a magically-created body"? Could the PCs plausibly get into a city?]

You're the GM, so you can declare that it works.

In general a decent city wall would keep out aliens (like humans), even ones shaped like primes.

One way (of many) that you could get around that is to have the mad wizard be the one who made that aspect of the wall, and have left a back door.

Another way, I suppose, is to have the process of bringing humans to WT convert them to primes -- giving them prime bodies and mageria at least -- a la the astral projection techniques of various pulp fiction of the last century. Prime mageria are what most city walls look for, I imagine.

There are other tricks around of course!

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shurhaian.livejournal.com

Prime mageria are what most city walls look for, I imagine.

Tangentially - would this mean that bonstables have some innate illusion that conceals their mageria? Otherwise spotting them would be rather trivial, I should think, in any context for which inspecting the magerium is normal(which the city wall boundary would be but social dealings would not). But as soon as Illusidor is introduced, of course, all bets are off...

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Innate or learned, I guess. Many of them operate outside of cities in any case. I certainly hope that none but the most skilled (or newest-model) bonstable can get into Vheshrame!

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Huh, I always got the impression that the gates in the wall were just that -- gates that anyone could come through when they're open. At best you'd get alarms or something if a monster tried to sneak through.

The book's discussion on doorwaying implies that it's not terribly *difficult*, just really illegal.

I guess it really depends on how paranoid primes are about security -- having your magerium inspected every time you go out to the farmer's market is a serious invasion of privacy! After all, looking at a magerium was described as being equivalent to a full body search.

But if the city's in a wartime footing for some reason it'd make sense to go to that much trouble.

...oh, and I just thought of something else. Kennoc effects give the wrong results 1 time in 20. That's a LOT of false positives if you're using a monster detector on a high-traffic gateway. O.O

Edited Date: 2010-07-03 08:32 pm (UTC)

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stormydragon.livejournal.com

Inspecting someone's magerium isn't very difficult. It'd be like complaining about people looking at what color your hair is.

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shurhaian.livejournal.com

It's not that easy - it takes a minute or so of concentrated thought - and it's considered rude to look at someone's magerium. So, not like hair colour.

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Quote from the rules:
You can, with a full minute's staring, inspect someone's magerium and get a good idea of their magical skill. This is considered rude and intrusive, rather like squeezing their muscles or genitals to see how suitable they are for other activities. People can disguise their mageriums with illusions.

Elsewhere, illusions take a Magic Analysis roll equal to P to detect them, and the best spell to see through them (complexity 80) gives +P/3+s6 to that roll.

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As near as I can tell, inspecting everyone's magerium is like, um, subjecting everyone who wants to come in to an invasive TSA screening where those being screened have to take off most of the outer lair of their clothes and have a wand waved over them for thirty seconds...

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kris-schnee.livejournal.com

False positives? Bah! If we don't start routine invasive magerium scans, the bonstables win!

(Hmm, wheriweffle would be cute...)

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*Snrrrkkkk* Oohhhhhh...

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shurhaian.livejournal.com

I don't think it's Kennoc at work, so much as the innate senses that a (semi)sentient spell can have. Bound spells, for instance, have enough magic sense to know when the object next to them does or does not have a bound spell, even without using Kennoc. Perhaps the magic sense can be more finely tuned when that's specifically what it needs to do?

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Sure... but then you're into the 'takes a minute and is easy to fool with illusidor' part since you've got the wall doing a personal inspection of each person. And the wall needs to be using its own senses, which are probably less acute than the wizard that made it (since that's how imbuing spells with skills generally works; see the baking example) -- the magical enhancements that would make it better at sensing a particular kind of magic do use Kennoc.

I think you'd end up with the wall being easy for anyone good enough to work on the wall to fool, or using magic that gives a lot of false positives, or (more likely) *both*.

Thinking about it, the most reasonable way to do it would be to have the wall's monster sensing feature look at people outside the wall, a good distance away, so that the guards have time to investigate any triggered alarm and decide whether or not to close the gate before it gets there. You really, really, really don't want the wall to take automatic action on its own except against people who try to sneak past by flying over or burrowing under or (maybe) being invisible or something.

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Offworlders have *no* mageria -- obviously it's just a wizard escorting some animated items.

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kistaro

Herethroy's vague resemblance to our world's horrifying boneless creatures whose young grow as ravenous parasites in a living paralyzed victim

Herethroy have never looked that much like politicians to me...

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The thought of loving a prime-shaped creature with an animal-level mind makes me shudder, and the reverse is confusing.

I prefer prime-shaped primes with prime-level minds, myself.

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Yea, but you don't have an animal minded creature that looks *exactly* like a waterform orren living in some of your rivers, lakes, and oceans!

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Some Orren I know aren't much better...

Actually, we do have animal-minded waterform-Orren-like mammals, called otters [in translation], plus norren who are monster-minded waterform-Orren-like mammals, and so on.

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Huh, I wonder how much difference there is between your otters and our otters. The obvious thing I can think of is that they are probably made of a small number of elements like corpador and aquador and spiridor, and ours are made of large numbers of elements with names like hydrogen and carbon and oxygen, though I wonder, outside of the smallest scale, how they would be different -- like in anatomic details and such. It'd be interesting to know!

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Give me your transdimensional address, and I shall be glad to send you a pair of them to investigate.

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Nooooo, they'd make a mess of EVERYTHING and pull drapes down and chew on my clothes and scare my pets, and, and, I don't have a big enough pool!! I don't have ANY working pool! AHHHH!

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kris-schnee.livejournal.com

That's what spontaneous magic is for! Spontaneous magic by excited transdimensional otters!

From what we know of the Tree's physics and biology, their "otters" would probably have a simpler brain structure, since most of the actual mind/spirit is a distinct entity from the body. And there wouldn't be much of an immune system, since disease is almost nonexistent. If anything like DNA and protein existed, they'd be stylized magic-element-based structures... imagining a protein being assembled in WT is boggling. We're told some of primes' abilities are based on magic-using organs, including shapeshifting for orren and hovering for khytsoyis. Stomach acid would be some kind of Aquador, probably. Even breathing would be some weird analogous version of what it's for in Earth animals -- snagging oxygen as part of a chemical reaction to break down sugar to recharge energy-storage molecules. I picture the gods saying, "How can we make the biology look something like what we're used to, despite completely different physics? Let's make something that looks like breathing and tie that into some part of this world's physiology."

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Presumably some sort of translation would have to work so that the creature can exist in other dimensions, but when WT creatures travel places with vastly different elements (ie, they have something that WTizens would recognize as having many of the attributes of "water" [use the term specifically for the stuff you drink] but doesn't scan as "aquador" [use the term for the innate element behind all liquids in the world tree], and still be able to interact with it in a useful way and gain sustenance from it, and such. How exactly does that sort of thing work? Don't the 7+12 generally want traveling Primes and such to be seen as "relatively powerful" when they are...abroad? So surely they set some things up to work well in foreign areas... just... what happens?

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